Müelheim-Kärlich — As head of the Müelheim-Kärlich nuclear reactor, Thomas Volmar spends his days plotting how to tear down his workplace. The best way to do that, he says, is to cut out humans. About 200 nuclear reactors around the world will be shut down over the next quarter century, mostly in Europe, according to the International Energy Agency. This means a lot of work for the half a dozen companies that specialise in the massively complex and dangerous job of dismantling plants. Those firms — including Areva, Rosatom’s Nukem Technologies Engineering Services, and Toshiba’s Westinghouse — are increasingly turning away from humans to do this work and deploying robots and other new technologies. This is transforming an industry that, until now, has mainly relied on electric saws, with the most rapid advances being made in the highly technical area of dismantling a reactor’s core — the super-radioactive heart of the plant where the nuclear reactions take place. The transformation ...
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